The Tory Imagination

Tuesday, 23 August 2011

During the final decades of the Soviet Union, the failure of Soviet agricultural policy, which was the ultimate cause of its demise, led to it enacting a series of reciprocal trade agreements with Western nations in which much-needed grain and agricultural products were exchanged for Soviet oil, minerals, and even scientists and technical specialists (the real "Brain Drain").

One of the most intriguing deals was the one that the USSR struck with the British government, in which agricultural diesel engines for use in tractors were exchanged for cultural products. Included in the deal was part of the output from The Upper Volga Corngrowers Co-operative Association Choral Dance Troop Ensemble, including their great morality tale concerning Vladimir Andropyornosin, a sub-nucleonic particle physicist who struggles to be a model Soviet citizen despite definite tendencies toward incorrect thinking and incorrect actions.

The Foreign Office, unclear about the best way to distribute this great work, managed, through contacts with their propaganda arm the BBC, to persuade the disgraced, decadent "pop" band The Stranglers to host the Ensemble's work on their b-sides and side projects. Quite what the deal with the band consisted of is still obscure, but we do know that the band gained access to the previously off-limits "Cheggars Plays Pop", and saw their music utilised as ambient music for various cookery programmes.

Vladimir's struggles with illicit substances, sailors, camels and Cuban bar owners are meant to offer an instructive discourse on the perils that await even the most sincere citizen when encountering backwards and corrupt elements both at home and abroad. The seriousness of the work's message cannot be understated, and, despite the demise of the Soviet Union, offers us profound insight even today.

Monday, 15 August 2011

The Tupolev Tu-95 "Bear" was for much of the post-war period the symbol of the Cold War. These sinister, silvery machines were regular visitors to British airspace in the 1970's and 1980's, and would often be pictured in British newspapers being gently shooed away by Royal Air Force jets. The missions that these planes undertook were nominally reconnaissances, but their real purpose was intimidatory, and it was intimidation that worked.

The "Bear" was a nuclear bomber, and its appearance was a constant reminder that the UK was easily within range of even the most basic Soviet nuclear capabilities. But what the Tupolev delivered was not bombs or missiles, but small, pearlescent balls of dread that would fall to earth and roll into the national nervous system. This submerged dread was never at the forefront of public consciousness, but always seemed to tick away in the background, a kind of ultimate nightmare that hid behind the more pressing social issues of the day.

It was another form of dread, immersed in the sounds imported from Jamaica that was to allow its expression - a hesitant, febrile leaking of psychic poison. The sound of screams suppressed by social convention.

Saturday, 6 August 2011

How long ago it all seems, but it's all preserved in these videos - the City Of London as a relentless, merciless taskmaster, impossible to evade or resist as it pushes your nerves to the grindstone in the service of its obscure and contradictory drives....